Legal Reasoning

What a thread! Now I understand why LSD posters become hooked! This site has some great threads!

Yeah too bad most of the posts are by people plagarizing other people's work and passing it off as their own.

Agreed. True, this isn't the "real world of an attorney," but IN the real world, we have a duty and an obligation to give credit to our sources. (ethically too, ya think?) I certainly would love to know where a lot of this comes from so I can consult the source for accuracy and any additional information that may be missing. But, whatever. This is lawschooldiscussion.org. And as someone reminded me before, I tend to be too serious. So, carry on.

It's a design created based on a four-triangle Rosecrucian symbol. It is composed of two figures - a central triangle and a seven-pointed figure. If one travels along the path described by this 7-pointed figure, one goes through a movement similar to the one described by the 6-pointed figure in the Enneagram. The Enneagram could have been drawn in such a way as to avoid using a 6-pointed figure. In other words, it was not because of the absence of adequate seven-pointed figures on which to map the 7-tone scale that Enneagram was chosen, with its 6-pointed figure.

In her 1972 book "The Gnostic Circle", Vedic Cosmologist Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet superimposes the Zodiac on the Enneagram and uses both the 12 and 9 divisions of the circle as an Integral Yoga which she presents an approach to understanding the evolution of consciousness.

Norelli-Bachelet suggests that there is more to the Enneagram than personality typing. She teaches an understanding of the Enneagram that includes the indivual's journey in various cycles of time. In her work, the Zero figures into the Enneagram, holding the same place as the 9 point at the top of the circle, and she sets the numbers flowing in a counter-clockwise direction, following the direction of the planets around the sun and the astrological signs around the Zodiac. Each Integer or point on the Enneagram of the Gnostic Circle corresponds to one of the planets, with the Sun as the Zero, Mercury as the One and finally Pluto as the Nine.

[...] That will change someday, but for now it's the conservatives' time because when our imagination of the future is weak, we fall back on the past for want of something better. And we find ourselves voting for mediocrities like George Bush rather than mediocrities like John Kerry for the same reason.[...]

Dubya went to Harvard B-school. "Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world," George W. Bush wrote in his 1999 book "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House". A lot has been made of the fact that this President holds a Master's of Business Administration, rather than the law sheepskin that most national politicians claim. Curiously, though, in his 243-page book, Bush dedicates only five paragraphs to the time in his life when he "was fascinated by the case study method that Harvard used to teach." Dubya fascinated by the Harvard case-study method? Come on, let's have a little more detail. What about burning the midnight oil? What about the toga parties? Did he kiss up to professors to get better grades? He'd go on to own the Texas Rangers baseball team, but could he find the time to play intramural softball?

So how did Dubya end up in Harvard, anyway? In 1973 he was discharged from the National Guard in order to enter Harvard Business School. By that time, Bush had already been rejected in his home state by the University of Texas' law school because of his lackluster performance at Yale. In 1973, "making the bar at Harvard was 98% meritocracy," says Michael Porter, now one of the B-school's most well-known professors and an expert in international competitive strategy. Bush's application landed at Harvard while his dad, George H. W. Bush, was chairman of the Republican National Committee. One year later, Poppy would become the top U.S. diplomat to China. Surely junior's application stood out. George W. Bush was a picture of honor once he got past his party days at Yale with the Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers and members of Skull & Bones, a secret society that enrolled him during his senior year -- so hush-hush, in fact, it barely gets a mention in his book. Bush earned an undergraduate degree in history from Yale in 1968.

Bush's Yale transcript shows that he was a C student. He got particularly poor grades in political science and economics. In his freshman year Bush was in the 21st percentile of his class. In other words, 79% of the students had better grades than he did. Indeed, when he gave a speech at Yale's 2001 commencement ceremony, he joked, "To the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States." Nobody can seem to locate his GMAT scores. But by 1973, he had completed a five-year stint in the Texas National Guard, worked on his father's failed 1970 Texas campaign for U.S. senator, and worked full-time for ProjectPULL, an organization that worked with inner-city youth.

Bush was no Baker Scholar, one of the top honors for a Harvard Business School grad. But he wasn't a bad student either, professors say. Harvard breaks its 800-student MBA classes into sections, and Bush was placed in Section C -- a generic classification with no relation to his grades. "He was an unpretentious, good middle-of-the-road student," a professor remembers. George W. was humble, a sloppy pad, even then. One professor says Bush "didn't emphasize his background at Yale or his father. But books aside, he was a happening guy. He was a referee for intramural sports. He also played intramural basketball and baseball. When it was time to put work aside, classmates say you could usually find him at parties thrown by his B-school buddies or at Charlie's Kitchen, a local hangout for burgers and beer. Legal Sea Foods restaurant was a favorite destination, too. Bush lived the bachelor's life in a single apartment in Central Square in Cambridge, Mass. "I studied, and ran and rode my bike a lot," Bush writes. "I was there to learn, and that's exactly what I did." That must be true, because he apparently had little time to clean up. His apartment was notoriously untidy and sparse, friends say. If you were lucky, he had a bottle of orange juice in the fridge, but that's about it.

For all the happy memories, few would have placed their bets on Bush becoming U.S. President. "Based upon our collective perception in 1973 to 1975, you could have won a lot of money with significant odds if you had bet upon George W. for President in 2001," says Eric Vogt, who attended Bush's January Inauguration and also sat in Section C with the future Prez. But Harvard Business School never lost track of Bush, and now it is updating the alumni rolodex. The class of 1975 secretary, J. Hans Stumm, just changed Bush's address from the Texas capitol to Pennsylvania Avenue. He recalls a tale he can't place as fact or fiction, but which suits the George W. Bush he remembers to a tee: "The story was that a professor started class saying, "Some of you will grow up to be President." Bush made a V-for-victory sign with his arms, and got a laugh out of everyone." Of course, in this crowd, being U.S. President wasn't as esteemed as "being head of IBM or General Motors," Stumm adds.

He recalls a tale he can't place as fact or fiction, but which suits the George W. Bush he remembers to a tee: "The story was that a professor started class saying, "Some of you will grow up to be President." Bush made a V-for-victory sign with his arms, and got a laugh out of everyone."

Terrorists, serial killers, and mass murderers can be phenomenologically described as narcissists in a constant state of deficient narcissistic supply. The "grandiosity gap" - the painful and narcissistically injurious gap between their grandiose fantasies and their dreary and humiliating reality - becomes emotionally insupportable. They decompensate and act out. They bring "down to their level" (by destroying it) the object of their pathological envy, the cause of their seething frustration, the symbol of their dull achievements, always incommensurate with their inflated self-image. They seek omnipotence through murder, control (not least self control) through violence, prestige, fame and celebrity by defying figures of authorities, challenging them, and humbling them. Unbeknownst to them, they seek self punishment. They are at heart suicidal. They aim to cast themselves as victims by forcing others to punish them. This is called "projective identification". They attribute evil and corruption to their enemies and foes. These forms of paranoia are called projection and splitting. These are all primitive, infantile, and often persecutory, defence mechanisms.

When coupled with narcissism - the inability to empathize, the exploitativeness, the sense of entitlement, the rages, the dehumanization and devaluation of others - this mindset yields abysmal contempt for the narcissist's victims. The overriding emotion of terrorists and serial killers, the amalgam and culmination of their tortured psyche - is deep seated disdain for everything human, the flip side of envy. It is cognitive dissonance gone amok. On the one hand the terrorist, or serial killer derides as "false", "meaningless", "dangerous", and "corrupt" common values, institutions, human intercourse, and society. On the other hand, he devotes his entire life (and often risks it) to the elimination and pulverization of these "insignificant" entities. To justify this apparent contradiction, the mass murderer casts himself as an altruistic savior of a group of people "endangered" by his foes. He is always self-appointed and self-proclaimed, rarely elected. The serial killer and the mass murderer rationalize and intellectualize their murders by purporting to "liberate" or "deliver" the victims from a fate worse than death.

The global reach, the secrecy, the impotence, and growing panic of his victims, of the public, and of his pursuers, the damage he wreaks - all serve as external ego functions. The terrorist cut pasted and serial killer regulate their sense of self esteem and self worth by feeding slavishly on the reactions to their heinous deeds. Their cosmic significance is daily sustained by newspaper headlines, ever increasing bounties, admiring copycats, successful acts of blackmail, the strength and size of their opponents, and the devastation of human life and property. Appeasement works only to aggravate their drives and strengthen their appetites by emboldening them and by raising the threshold of excitation and "narcissistic supply". Terrorists and killers are addicted to this drug of being acknowledged and reflected. They derive their sense of existence, parasitically, from the reactions of their (often captive) audience.

Erich Fromm suggested that both Hitler and Stalin were narcissistic mass murderers. Hitler and Nazism are often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic break with European history. Yet the truth is that they were the culmination and reification of European history in the 19th century. Europe's annals of colonialism have prepared it for the range of phenomena associated with the Nazi regime - from industrial murder to racial theories, from slave labour to the forcible annexation of territory.

Germany was a colonial power no different to murderous Belgium or Britain. What set it apart is that it directed its colonial attentions at the heartland of Europe - rather than at Africa or Asia. Both World Wars were colonial wars fought on European soil. Moreover, Nazi Germany innovated by applying prevailing racial theories (usually reserved to non-whites) to the white race itself. It started with the Jews - a non-controversial proposition - but then expanded them to include "east European" whites, such as the Poles and the Russians. Germany was not alone in its malignant nationalism. The far right in France was as pernicious. Nazism - and Fascism - were world ideologies, adopted enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iraq, Egypt, Norway, Latin America, and Britain. At the end of the 1930's, liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism (and its mutations) were locked in mortal battle of ideologies. Hitler's mistake was to delusionally believe in the affinity between capitalism and Nazism - an affinity enhanced, to his mind, by Germany's corporatism and by the existence of a common enemy: global communism.

Colonialism always had discernible religious overtones and often collaborated with missionary religion. "The White Man's burden" of civilizing the "savages" was widely perceived as ordained by God. The church was the extension of the colonial power's army and trading companies. It is no wonder that Hitler's lebensraum colonial movement - Nazism - possessed all the hallmarks of an institutional religion: priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, mythology. Hitler was this religion's ascetic saint. He monastically denied himself earthly pleasures (or so he claimed) in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling. Hitler was a monstrously inverted Jesus, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that (Aryan) humanity should benefit. By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, Hitler became a distorted version of Nietzsche's "superman".

But being a-human or super-human also means being a-sexual and a-moral. In this restricted sense, Hitler was a post-modernist and a moral relativist. He projected to the masses an androgynous figure and enhanced it by fostering the adoration of nudity and all things "natural". But what Nazism referred to as "nature" was not natural at all. It was an aesthetic of decadence and evil (though it was not perceived this way by the Nazis), carefully orchestrated, and artificial. Nazism was about reproduced copies, not about originals. It was about the manipulation of symbols - not about veritable atavism.

In short: Nazism was about theatre, not about life. To enjoy the spectacle (and be subsumed by it), Nazism demanded the suspension of judgment, depersonalization, and de-realization. Catharsis was tantamount, in Nazi dramaturgy, to self-annulment. Nazism was nihilistic not only operationally, or ideologically. Its very language and narratives were nihilistic. Nazism was conspicuous nihilism - and Hitler served as a role model, annihilating Hitler the Man, only to re-appear as Hitler the stychia.

What was the role of the Jews in all this? Nazism posed as a rebellion against the "old ways" - against the hegemonic culture, the upper classes, the established religions, the superpowers, the European order. The Nazis borrowed the Leninist vocabulary and assimilated it effectively. Hitler and the Nazis were an adolescent movement, a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon a narcissistic (and rather psychopathic) toddler nation-state. Hitler himself was a malignant narcissist, as Fromm correctly noted. The Jews constituted a perfect, easily identifiable, reification of all that was "wrong" with Europe. They were an old nation, they were eerily disembodied (without a territory), they were cosmopolitan, they were part of the establishment, they were "decadent", they were hated on religious and socio-economic grounds (see Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners"), they were different, they were narcissistic (felt and acted as morally superior), they were everywhere, they were defenseless, they were credulous, they were adaptable (and thus could be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They were the perfect hated father figure and parricide was in fashion.

This is precisely the source of the fascination with Hitler. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, and wishes. He provides us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization. Hitler forced us all through a time warp and many did not emerge. He was not the devil. He was one of us. He was what Arendt aptly called the banality of evil. Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed, failure, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation, who lived through disturbed and failing times. He was the perfect mirror, a channel, a voice, and the very depth of our souls.

George W. Bush was a picture of honor once he got past his party days at Yale with the Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers and members of Skull & Bones, a secret society that enrolled him during his senior year -- so hush-hush, in fact, it barely gets a mention in his book. Bush earned an undergraduate degree in history from Yale in 1968.

President George W. Bush sent Victor Ashe, the US Ambassador to Poland and a "special" friend since their cheerleader and cohabitation days at Yale University, "candy and flowers" via US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage. In another matter, Armitage surprised observers in Warsaw by an apparent criticism of his boss, the president. The real reason Armitage was in Poland is to check up on the US Ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe. Mr. Ashe and president Bush have had a "special relationship" since their college days at Yale, where they were roommates and male cheerleaders together.

Just how "fabulous" is Mr. Ashe, Georgie?

"It's known by many sources that George W. Bush in 1968 [when he was tapped into the Skulls and Bones] was performing homosexual acts with his male sex-mate and Yale roommate Mayor Ashe of Knoxville, TN. While mayor, Ashe made several unscheduled visits to the White House and, according to US Secret Service sources, Bush made at least 8 unscheduled and unannounced trips to Knoxville while he has been President. Ashe is suspected of two arrests. One was in Washington DC and the other was in Atlanta, while he was a Tennessee state legislator. They allegedly involved arrests while he was picking up male tranvestite prostitutes in public restrooms. Ashe was allegedly introduced on live TV, by Peter Jennings, as "The gay mayor from Knoxville" at a national mayor's conference in San Francisco."

The mainline Australian newspaper, The Age, reported last week, prior to the release of Kitty Kelley's book "The Family" (Bush's) some charges Kelley could make, including:

Quote

"She may also raise a nasty rumour that circulates in Washington DC from time to time, that President Bush had a 'special relationship' with a former mayor of Tennessee, Victor Ashe, who is now the US ambassador to Poland."

A newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, noted the president's lack of manliness in the 9/11 catastrophe. Bush was to stunned to react for about 9 minutes. Then he spent the rest of the day boring holes in the sky with Air Force One and hiding like a rabbit in a hole in the ground near Omaha, Nebraska. "W" STANDS FOR "WIMP."

There are even suspicions in the US that the anthrax mailings right after 9/11 -- a matter that like Bin Laden, is still unsolved -- was used to shut down the National Enquirer newspaper in Florida, which had photos of George W. Bush from his Skull and Bones secret society days at Yale in compromising sexual positions. Ambassador Ashe was a member of Skull and Bones at the same time. The only casualty of the Florida attack was the photo editor, Bob Stevens, whose widow sued the US Government for not keeping the anthrax under control. The building was bought for a ridiculously low price by none other than the New York mayor, George Bush's pal, Rudy Guiliani, who has cleaned it up.

He recalls a tale he can't place as fact or fiction, but which suits the George W. Bush he remembers to a tee: "The story was that a professor started class saying, "Some of you will grow up to be President." Bush made a V-for-victory sign with his arms, and got a laugh out of everyone."

Hahaha, this is so funny!

Dubya is a big f**ckin' mess! A professor of mine put it like this one day in class: "I can't believe people are still listening to a mentally retarded!"

"It's known by many sources that George W. Bush in 1968 [when he was tapped into the Skulls and Bones] was performing homosexual acts with his male sex-mate and Yale roommate Mayor Ashe of Knoxville, TN. While mayor, Ashe made several unscheduled visits to the White House and, according to US Secret Service sources, Bush made at least 8 unscheduled and unannounced trips to Knoxville while he has been President. Ashe is suspected of two arrests. One was in Washington DC and the other was in Atlanta, while he was a Tennessee state legislator. They allegedly involved arrests while he was picking up male tranvestite prostitutes in public restrooms. Ashe was allegedly introduced on live TV, by Peter Jennings, as "The gay mayor from Knoxville" at a national mayor's conference in San Francisco."

The mainline Australian newspaper, The Age, reported last week, prior to the release of Kitty Kelley's book "The Family" (Bush's) some charges Kelley could make, including:

Quote

"She may also raise a nasty rumour that circulates in Washington DC from time to time, that President Bush had a 'special relationship' with a former mayor of Tennessee, Victor Ashe, who is now the US ambassador to Poland."